The Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 5440 appears to be a basic inkjet printer, but that description is somewhat limiting. The Deskjet 5440 is compact, lightweight and easy to set up, and with its features and print quality, it can serve equally well as an affordable photo printer.

One downside, and one that isn't limited to the set-up process, is that you must manually calibrate the printer every time you change ink cartridges. The printer uses a black cartridge and a tricolor cartridge. For more true-to-life color when printing color photos, you can swap the black cartridge for a photo cartridge, although this means calibrating the printer again. Unless you're going to print a large batch of photos at a time, the cartridge swapping and calibration process may not be worth the effort.

The paper input tray can hold 100 sheets of plain paper or ten envelopes, and the output tray can hold 50 sheets of plain paper. The trays can fold up when not in use. The Deskjet 5440 can handle the usual variety of paper sizes and stocks, including letter, legal, envelopes, card stock, labels, iron-on transfers and borderless photos, as well as banners up to 24 inches long.

The Deskjet 5440 supports printing resolutions of up to 1,200X1,200 dpi (rendered) for monochrome printing and up to 4,800 dpi (optimized) for color printing. Output quality is good to very good for business documents (text and graphics), and photo output quality, particularly if you use the photo inkjet cartridge, is generally good. When printing color photos, you can use the built-in HP Real Life technology to automatically eliminate red-eye and punch up the detail in dark areas of photos.

The Deskjet 5440 is bundled with a black inkjet cartridge, a tri-color inkjet cartridge, HP Image Zone Photo & Imaging software (for basic photo editing, photo organization, and sharing photos via e-mail), a setup poster, a user guide, a power supply and a power cord.

Pro:  Good output quality, accepts six ink colors for true-to-life color photos, can print directly from PictBridge-compatible cameras through a port on the front of the printer
Con:  Relatively slow print speeds, requires manual alignment every time you change ink cartridges, higher per-page printing costs because it doesn't accept high-capacity ink cartridges

Warranty
1 year hardware, 1 year technical phone support